So’s Long Island, where Trump was (allegedly) born.
So’s Scotland, his motherland, where I suppose he still holds citizenship. (They don’t want him either).
In the case of the bin Laden operation, Obama deserves plenty of credit. Shrubby had peeled resources away from the hunt for bin Laden as early as the spring of 2002 (in order to scout out the invasion of Iraq, of course) and called it off entirely by 2006. Obama deserves credit for instructing the military to revive that hunt, without which there would have been no opportunity to give the order to go ahead with the mission to kill bin Laden when the opportunity arose.
Besides, any leader worth his salt isn’t going to just unthinkingly accept the recommendations of the people who report to him. S/he will want to have a good idea of what the plan is, enough to ask good questions about what the risks are, where it could break down, and what the plan is when something goes wrong. Obama, being the conscientious sort he is, surely did all this in spades when Osama was located and the military presented their plan.
Same thing with Carter, only a bit different. Our military in 1980 was still pulling itself back together in the wake of the Vietnam days. The notion that it could pull off an Entebbe-style rescue was a long shot, and you can’t tell me that the military people didn’t tell Carter this was a risky mission with the odds being against a successful rescue of the hostages.
And per Rumsfeld, you go to war with the army you’ve got, not the army you’d like to have. Carter had the military of 1980, with all that that meant, and he chose to go ahead with this very risky mission anyway. It was his gamble, and the loss has to be on his head. Again, it was more than just “here’s what the military men are telling me, so that’s what I’ll do” without any thought or agency.
Horse puckey.
In both cases, the military said they could do it.
Carter was a nuclear engineer in a submarine, for Christ’s sake.
I am sure that Obama ran obstacle course with the seals, when they couldn’t hit a target, he showed them how, and instructed the pilot how to land a stealth helicopter.
Horse puckey.
Trump wasn’t born, he paid someone to move a wet rock so that he could pretend to crawl out from under it.
And I’m certain that in both cases they had the mission explained to them in some detail. They understood at some level the risks involved, and gave the go ahead. I don’t know if Carter actually monitored the Iran mission, but we know that Obama was watching the bin Laden one. Both took responsibility, one for success, one for failure.
Compare and contrast to the Yemen raid:
Surely, a President is ultimately responsible, but it is not as though they could actually do something to make a plan succeed or fail.
I’m responsible if my dog poops in the neighbor’s garden, but I didn’t do the pooping.
No, but they decide if the plan will be executed - so they can certainly prevent failure by not allowing it to proceed (which IIRC was the counsel given to Obama).
Just like if you don’t let your dog into the neighbor’s yard, it can’t poop there.
The Iran rescue mission really only failed because of fairly unlikely equipment malfunctions. But in any event, whether or not the POTUS deserves blame/credit for successful military operations, the POTUS gets the blame. Or the credit.
And that makes sense. Lincoln wasn’t personally directing pincer movements at the Battle of Manassas, but he’s rightly lauded for saving the Union.
There were several more steps to go, with a lot of iffiness at each step. I remember the plan being diagrammed out in the newspapers afterwards, and thinking about just how many things still would have had to go right for it to work, even if nothing had gone wrong at Desert One.